Rackspace Hosting to Offer Hosted Virtual Desktop Platform

Rackspace^® Hosting (NYSE: RAX), the world’s leading specialist in the hosting and cloud computing industry, announced at Citrix Summit 2011 today the availability of the Rackspace hosted virtual desktop platform. The hosted virtual desktop platform utilizes Rackspace’s comprehensive hosting services and may be paired with industry leading desktop virtualization solutions from Citrix and other joint channel partners. The offering enables customers to host their virtual desktops on their choice of dedicated and/or cloud solutions.

The market for hosted virtual desktop platforms is growing considerably as virtual desktops are increasingly adopted in the enterprise. In fact, Gartner expects mainstream adoption of virtual desktops to take place in 2012 through 2014, with 70 million users by 2014¹. Desktop virtualization solutions, such as Citrix XenDesktop® and Citrix XenApp™, deliver on-demand virtual desktops and applications anywhere users are and on almost any device, including PCs, smartphones, and even tablets. Because of this, virtual desktops can provide:

• Improved productivity,
• Increased flexibility and mobility for the workforce,
• Improved business agility, and
• Simplified desktop management.

By hosting virtual desktops with Rackspace, companies can free up IT resources for more critical internal business operations.

"As enterprises realize the strategic value of the business agility, workforce flexibility and management efficiency offered by desktop virtualization, they are rapidly growing their implementations,” said Matt Lull, senior director, global strategic alliances for Citrix Systems. "Rackspace’s hosted virtual desktop platform gives enterprises instant access to the infrastructure they need, whether it’s a dedicated environment for virtual desktop infrastructure or for shared hosted desktops. We’re excited to build on our portfolio by offering this joint solution, which enables us to extend new innovations in virtual desktops to our customers.”

The Rackspace hosted virtual desktop platform uniquely combines RackConnect®, best-of-breed partner solutions and Fanatical Support® to deliver an unmatched solution in the marketplace. With RackConnect®, customers can deploy a virtual desktop solution that utilizes Private Cloud to help address security and compliance concerns and to manage and control servers while benefiting from the scale and cost effectiveness of the CloudServers for XenApp environments. The Rackspace hosted virtual desktop platform can also allow customers to reduce deployment times of upgrades and new infrastructure deployments while reducing CAPEX.

The Rackspace hosted virtual desktop platform offers a solution that utilizes best-of-breed partner solutions for virtual desktop network and storage. It also combines powerful compute platforms with highly scalable and efficient NetApp^® storage which enables the provisioning of thousands of virtual desktops quickly with virtually instant storage cloning.

By working with Rackspace, channel partners and VARs can add the Rackspace hosted virtual desktop platform to their portfolio of offerings, without the additional expenses associated with purchasing the hardware and hiring resources to manage the environment.

"We’re tapping our vast community of partners and their networks to provide customers with a hosted virtual desktop platform that offers them choices,” said Odus Wittenburg, vice president of enterprise solutions for Rackspace. "Providing Fanatical Support on top of our solutions portfolio produces exceptional business outcomes for our customers and that is what we do best. By working with partners like Citrix and their network of nearly 9,000 partners, we can utilize their exceptional software and application solutions, which is what they do best.”

As a leader in web hosting and cloud computing, Rackspace is committed to providing resellers and channel partners with premier hosting as the foundation for configuring solutions for their customers. This Rackspace offering will also be available directly to resellers through the Rackspace Partner Program.

With the announcement of the Rackspace hosted virtual desktop platform, Rackspace and Citrix will launch a hosted virtual desktop demo environment. This demo environment is hosted at Rackspace and optimally tuned utilizing Citrix software and NetApp® storage to give users the opportunity to experience desktop virtualization for 30 days from nearly any device. The hosted virtual desktops will have some common desktop productivity applications loaded for users to test how virtualized desktops perform in a "real-world" office environment. For more information about the Rackspace hosted virtual desktop platform please visit: http://www.rackspace.com/hvd or http://www.rackspace.com/citrix.

¹ "Forecast: Hosted Virtual Desktops, Worldwide, 2010-2014 (2010 Update),” December 1, 2010, Gartner, Inc. Report G00206728

About Rackspace Hosting

Rackspace Hosting is the world's leading specialist in the hosting and cloud computing industry, and the founder of OpenStack, an open source cloud platform. The San Antonio-based company provides Fanatical Support^® to its customers, across a portfolio of IT services, including Managed Hosting and Cloud Computing. Rackspace has been recognized by Bloomberg BusinessWeek as a Top 100 Performing Technology Company and was featured on Fortune’s list of 100 Best Companies to Work For. For more information, visit www.rackspace.com.

Forward Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions. If such risks or uncertainties materialize or such assumptions prove incorrect, the results of Rackspace Hosting could differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements and assumptions. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements, including any statements concerning expected development, performance or market acceptance associated with Rackspace services and products, including Rackspace hosted virtual desktop platform; anticipated operational and financial benefits from Rackspace services and products, including Rackspace hosted virtual desktop platform; any statements of expectation or belief; and any statements of assumptions underlying any of the foregoing. Risks, uncertainties and assumptions including the possibility that expected benefits from Rackspace hosted virtual desktop platform may not materialize because this product is not generally accepted in the marketplace, which could occur due to certain factors including (i) a failure to market the product cost effectively, differentiate the product from competitive products or communicate differentiations effectively, (ii) the reliability, quality or compatibility associated with the product, (iii) changes in technology which adversely affect the product's benefit, (iv) slowdowns in the general economy or technology industry that impact consumer spending habits, (v) internal strategy decisions that impact the product, and (vi) other risks that are described in Rackspace Hosting's Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2011, filed with the SEC on May 10, 2011. Except as required by law, Rackspace Hosting assumes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements publicly, or to update the reasons actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements, even if new information becomes available in the future.

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